Suggestion: PokeZine (The Official PokeCommunity Magazine)

So, I had an idea looking at an image of the cover for jan-feb issue of CoroCoro, and I thought, HEY! It'd be cool if PC had it's own magazine. I could write for it along with some others, and I have a friend who can do cover art and what not. We could have it digital for now until we are ready for other. What do you guys think about this? I mean, PC would be the first Pokemon Community to have its own Magazine. What do you guys think! Give me your feedback, let's get the HStaff to notice this topic as I think it would be amazing for PC's growth.

I did a little example for a cover art, it's not the best, but hey! I tried. SORRY It's so big...

I think this idea will need a lot more explanation before it could really go anywhere - what kind of areas would you propose the magazine would cover? A forum newsletter magazine honestly wouldn't have enough updates & such to write about frequently enough for a magazine, any Pokémon news is already covered from countless other sources, general Pokémon talk to covered on the forums and such - I'm just curious what you'd actually include in this magazine to make it worthwhile? It's a quirky idea, but unless there's some reasonable content for it each time it's published I can't see it working out.

Theres endless things you could cover. Pokemon of the Week, Forum Member of the Year, Pokemon Movie News, Game New, Show News, stuff going on in the forums...countless stuff...

Also, I would think you'd need to heavily cover what the fanbase at large is doing to make it worthwhile, along with maybe some editorials from other game sites. Essentially, it'd have to become a magazine version of Pokemon Elite 2000. I wouldn't be interested solely if it were just Pokemon game information, one could get that from Serebii, and that kind of wears thin unless you're aiming to be like Nintendo Power. Otherwise, most magazines either include stories from other people (which is usually used to inform others by the end about something), or tips to do stuff.

Additionally, with the fan side of things, Pe2k doesn't seem to discriminate about submissions to fan art/fan comics/media etc they seem to get, and they all get links back. I'm just putting that out there. I'm actually sort of proud of them for taking that route, though, considering the Pokemon fan side of things used to be somewhat more, I dunno, devisive? Cliquish? Elitist? All I'm saying is that I dunno how I'd feel if it seemed like this magazine was being a little more picky or unfair. Like we're taking steps backwards or something.

Anyway, just my two cents from someone who enjoys the A & D section, and fan works in general.

Hopefully the name dropping of sites doesn't count as advertising, I was merely using them as examples.

The Magazine would include any type of art anyone would want in it, if they wanted to sumbit art they could, it's FOR the community, not for just one person. :)

That's reassuring. :) Too easy, at that. I wonder why things weren't this way several years ago? Well, I'm happy, I just think it'll do more to bring people closer together, and get people to see lots of amazing things they may not have even noticed if they were just, you know, shut out for not being popular or something.

I want people to be able to take there time and read stuff and really get to know what pokemon is you know? Pokemon isn't just a game in my opinion, it can teach us a lot believe it or not. I want people to enjoy reading about pokemon :)

Elite Four Lucian said:

I want people to be able to take there time and read stuff and really get to know what pokemon is you know? Pokemon isn't just a game in my opinion, it can teach us a lot believe it or not. I want people to enjoy reading about pokemon :)

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But is this not the whole reason we have countless forums to discuss Pokémon in? I'm finding it really hard to see what this magazine could offer that posting/browsing the forum wouldn't.

Pokemon of the Week, Forum Member of the Year, Pokemon Movie News, Game New, Show News, stuff going on in the forums...countless stuff...

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Pokémon of the week - Okay, but this is half a page once a week. A nice feature sure, but not much content for the overall magazine.
Member of the year - We have a whole event dedicated to this here with a lot of forum advertising, so I'm not sure what the magazine would change about this other than saying "____ is our member of the year - congrats!"; only a couple extra lines for the magazine
Movie News - Covered in the anime section
Game News - Covered in the multiple gaming sections
Show News - I assume you mean anime? If so, covered in the anime section
Stuff going on in the forums - I really don't get what you mean here. If you mean updates we have a thread for that, if you mean moddings etc they have threads made per mod and they're widely known events, and I'm not sure what else you could really be aiming at here? One use I do see for this section is advertising forum events, but once again that's only half a page at best.

So realistically from the content you've listed there, there's only just about enough to perhaps cover a page each time it's published?

Once again, I think it's a nice idea but not really something that we'd need or something that'd work out in practice. If there's some legitimate content that'd benefit from being part of a magazine (such as dbp's art comment, but not the whole forum is interested in art) then I'd be more open to the idea, but as it stands I don't see why we'd have a magazine based on what you can simply find by clicking on a thread title. I do understand that the magazine wouldn't aim to replace these threads or anything, but I can't see people reading the magazine whilst they can access all the information so easily at the click of a thread.

Although this is just my view, so others might disagree. :)

A lot of websites such as EGMNow has a magazine as well as a website, that covers the same thing as in the magazine. I get what you mean, but the point of it is, if people dont have time to get on here, then what? People have to scroll through hundreads of threads just to get the info they want.

Elite Four Lucian said:

A lot of websites such as EGMNOW has a magazine as well as a website, that covers the same thing as in the magazine. I get what you mean, but the point of it is, if people dont have time to get on here, then what? People have to scroll through hundreads of threads just to get the info they want.

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But instead they have time to wait until the magazine is published, come here anyway, find, download, and scan through a magazine, rather than going to a forum they're curious about/expecting it to be in and looking through the first few most recent threads for the news any time or day of the week...?

The difference is that we're a forum whereas EGM is a website dedicated to giving news and stories for people to read, there's two completely different dynamics here. Something like EGM can use a magazine because their job is to relay news, interviews, etc. Also didn't EGM start off as a magazine and then develop a website second?

You're right :) But I just really want to contribute to this website, and I thought this was the best way..

Well, I think a creative-corner type of collaboration thing (like that magazine!), just to try, would bring us all together! :) doesn't matter if we all succeed, just matters if we try!

Yeah, maybe it'd be better to stick with just creative based things? They're plentiful and endless in the sense that it's always updating. You have to wait years for new information on the next generation of games, which is the only thing most people notice. And creative doesn't necessarily mean art, either. Entertainment media and creative writing would probably be better. That would even include really cool remixes or covers, so those with musical talents could get in on the action. Personally, I've always wanted to know where the heck other animators are, or what Pokemon animations exist (that aren't raunchy parodies or whatever). I think a magazine could even help with something like that.

While I personally wouldn't scan each thread to see what topics are present in the forum (something the magazine could be helpful for, I'll admit), I'm going to say a lot of topics here are "this or that" or "what do you like" in nature, and outside of general discussion, there doesn't seem to be a lot of meaty discussions going on. I don't want to generalize, but that's kind of what I see when I just look at an entire section at once. I just wonder how in the world you can make a magazine about that and not have it come off as hollow.

If you made a magazine that had nothing but thought provoking material, or pointed out where it all was, that'd be really cool, but I feel like it might be too tl;dr for PC? Maybe? Again, just going by what I observe overall.

Just a few more ideas. I dunno if at that point, though, it'd be Poke Community: The Magazine as opposed to Pokemon Fan Magazine, but well.

Well I've been thinking of your feedback and I've been further developing the idea and this is what I came up with.

So, the general idea was to have the magazine focus on Pokemon Game News, Anime News, General happenings in the pokemon world, and other various things. But I thought, that since I want this to be for the community about the community, we could have stuff like battles that happend between two people on here, and interview the winner and put them in the magazine, or people with huge trade threads, and even stuff about the Emulation and Game Development Thread in there, along with the other things. While it is true that games only come every so often, there will always be some sort of Game news, reguardless it be a RPG or a game like Mystery Dungeon, there will always be news about a Pokemon Game because they are always coming out. We could include maybe developer interviews when the magazine gets big enough and what not, we could have specific staff deemed as "Reporters" and etc. While the HStaff will be in charge of the final product once each issue of the Zine is done, the bulk of it will be run by the "ZineStaff". I played this in my head and it fits very well, going off the original idea, this adds more to it and makes it exciting and there is something in there for everyone.

Great idea! I Hope that can be realized!